Police training venture comes under spotlight
Costa Rican bar association sees threat to `sovereignty and values' in updated version of 1960s experiment.
The Colegio de Abogados de Costa Rica (the national bar association) has drawn attention to a US regional security initiative that had remained largely under the radar: the establishment of an International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) for Latin America in San José. This is the result of an agreement signed between the US and Costa Rica in June last year, which has yet to be ratified by the Costa Rican congress (it caught the lawyers' attention as it began to move last week at committee stage).
The president of the Colegio de Abogados, Manuel Amador, summoned foreign journalists to tell them that the project was `a threat to Costa Rican sovereignty and values'. Actually, all Costa Rica provides is the premises and the administration. The school is to be run by the US State, Treasury and Justice departments, and the DEA, on a pattern already in use in four similar institutions (in Bangkok, Budapest, Gaborone and Roswell, New Mexico).
Its purpose, as explained at the time to the US Congress, is to provide training to members of the Latin American police and security services, and their judiciaries, in dealing with `transnational crime issues, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, sexual exploitation of children, and violence against women [as well as] the terrorist elements who often use criminal enterprise to accomplish their goals.' The academy's director and deputy director will be US employees, the staff Costa Ricans, and the instructors professionals from the entire region.
The Colegio de Abogados, drawing from the papers before the Costa Rican congress, say the curriculum also includes people trafficking, illegal migration, cybercrime, drug trafficking and the prevention of terrorist attacks.
At the time the agreement was signed, there was some concern that the ILEA would be confused by the public with the old School of the Americas (now Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), which trained many of those Latin American military officers who installed repressive régimes in the 1960s and 1970s. In the immediate region, though, another association could prove more damaging: with the Inter-American Police Academy (IAPA) established in Panama in the early 1960s to `train Latin American police officers in modern police administration and techniques, as well as how to counter uprisings.' After the `Panamanian flag riots' of 1964, the IAPA was moved to Washington, where it was subsumed in the International Police Academy (IPA).